1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to data matching systems, and more specifically, data matching systems utilizing supplemental temporal information, such as temporal clinical information.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Healthcare networks have very complicated organization structures. An organization typically comprises multiple source systems (e.g., a source of electronic medical records including electronic health records (EHR), records from a claims system, lab feed, various data sources implementing the HL7 standard, patient satisfaction survey, etc.). Within each source system, data may be input for various entities (i.e., patients, companies, etc.), perhaps based on forms that a patient fills out. Accordingly, various data objects in a source system may be associated with a common entity (i.e., patients) even though the data objects have different information contained therein. For example, data objects within different source systems of an organization or even within a single source system of a single organization may be associated with a common patient.
Moreover, clinically integrated networks (CIN) or galaxies (e.g., a group of organizations) are collections of individual healthcare systems with data sharing agreements. Data governance restrictions may exist within organizations or galaxies (e.g., not all data can be shared with all providers). Accordingly, examining and associating records of the different healthcare systems with common entities may be complex, burdensome, and processing intensive (with respect to processing resources and processing time). This is typically exacerbated in the case of data governance restrictions.